“The experience of illness can help us gain in courage even if we fail in capacity. We will sometimes fail to produce what we should, or to write or speak articulately enough, to be “right,” to be thoughtful or expansive enough, to consider the whole range of historical circumstance, to be responsible at our work’s distribution—but our failure is part of the collective project. We brave our errors in thought for the possibility that to see that their demonstration will allow others to get toward rightness. We brave the humility to learn from fair criticism, and also learn that usefully distanced shrug at the inevitable appearance of the jealous or maligning kind. We brave clumsy writing or speaking, that even in a crude form, a necessary idea will emerge as material for others to refine. When we are silent, we learn it makes room for others to speak.
It’s not just our errors we become brave about, but our projects’—and our own—incompleteness. You can stop fearing death, too, if you begin to think of the collective project of being alive in the common world, that one’s own end and the end to one’s work and one’s love is not the end of what is right or good. What needs to go on will.” for more
A well-person’s astral projection remains mostly atmospheric, but the deeply ill person in pain, in order to escape it, can sprint away from the pain-husk of the failing body and think themselves into a range beyond range. When pain is so vast it makes it hard to remember history or miles-per-hour, which should make the sickbed the incubator for almost all genius and nearly most revolution.
I’ve been lucky that this book has found its readers, and among them, a set of brilliant reviewers. I’ve updated this page with links to reviews.
I’ve been told the book has been very difficult to get ahold of lately. Everyone is busy ironing out logistical issues so that the situation can stabilize, backorders can get filled, and readers can read (though it’s an irresponsibly sad book – I am not so sure if you should), but in the meantime, there are a few finally back in stock at Small Press Distribution . If you’ve been looking to get your hands on a hard copy, your best bet right now is to buy it there.
SPD is a small nonprofit organization dedicated to the distribution of small press books. Without it, books like mine would have a much more difficult time finding their readers. Every time you buy a book from SPD, you help support their operations, and if you have a little extra money, you can become a member and get a discount on books and shipping. They’ve been heroes for my book, and without their work on behalf of others, too, I would barely have anything to read –
this month, my eight part series on being sick, being cared for, sickbeds, death art, ill thinking, los angeles, and the lives of the poets is unrolling at the Harriet blog. Here’s the first installment –
I keep typing ‘exhaustion’ into my document, instead of the other three-syllabled word ending in -tion that I mean to write. Some words of others, while I write privately…
Juliet Jacques on writing as productive self-cannibalism, from my interview, ‘Trans Historical Narratives’, in The New Inquiry:
“You have said that you’ve exhausted yourself in the process of writing Trans. In the interview with Sheila Heti that forms the book’s epilogue, you even speak of having ‘cannibalised’ yourself – it’s a violent idea.
Exhausted is exactly the word. You can’t feed mostly upon yourself and sustain enough energy to live, that’s always going to be counter-productive. The process of writing about oneself is draining, and comes with a whole set of anxieties.”
~
Claudia Rankine, on placing exhaustion in society’s structures, rather than the subject:
“What if we switch the focus on tiredness to the hearing of the thing? So that the sense of exhaustion with hearing the racist moment elicits a kind of tiredness too. I’m tired of hearing this so I need to say something, because I would like a space that does not hold this. This notion that exhaustion only comes in terms of response – it should come in the hearing of it. The [racist utterance] is the burden, in and of itself, not my responding to it.”
~
Stephanie DeGooyer on a peculiar or positive end-point of exhaustion in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts:
“Exhaustion is a transitive state, a state of rest and repose between fighting and fucking, or failing to fuck and fight. It defines the shift from the insatiability of sexual desire to post-partum collapse. It is not the moment of giving up, though. Exhaustion, as Nelson figures it, involves acknowledging a dependence on the care of others. […] ‘From my station of fatigue,’ says Nelson, ‘exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped.’”
I’m interested in the (anti-)productive outcome of zero energy, and how this works against capitalist labour, to allow access to an unmarketable self. Preciado speaks to this born-again kind of state, here:
“I wish for you to no longer have the force to repeat the norm, to no longer have the energy to fabricate identity, to lose faith in what your papers say about you. And once you have lost all courage, drained with joy, I wish for you that you invent another mode of use for your bodies. It is because I love you that I desire you weak and despicable. Because it is through fragility that the revolution operates.”
~
And Agnes Martin (on whom I have an essay in Eros Journal’s The Interior):
“When relationships are exhausted and thinking is exhausted, then is the time for inspiration.”
I’ve only watched it once. There are Missy’s mortuary metaphors, the mining lights on the dancer’s heads, Pharrell turned marionette in a feature so wooden it was probably, as Arabelle Sicardi quipped on twitter, workshopped with Jay. Sometimes Missy is in a hive – of graves, of combs, of catacombs, of a vertical scaffolding made horizontal. And there are the plastic bags: for corpses? for hiding stuff? for treasures? for – but it can’t be, the word can’t be allowed in proximity to Missy – garbage? Maybe the plastic bag is a kite in situ. Maybe a kite is an escape in situ. Maybe an escape is a soaring in situ. Maybe Missy is a subtle waiting Icarus and in this, unmeltable. It’s not the first time Missy has brought a performance from that kind of container. It’s not the first time, too, that the torso is obscured in a foregrounding of a head, of some limbs.
Everyone knows where WTF/ Where They From comes from is from of years of wanting it, in this it’s an emerging from ossification. Maybe what is ossified is a fandom’s desire over these long hauls, how it has never ceased its proportion and then became a wood, a substance that creaks but does not shrink. The we-want-more-from-Missy always stays the same size, the we-want-more of Missy fans so big I have to make a new word for it: gargantic. In the dimness of the video’s lighting, there’s also a lit up joy, a making music out of where you are from – the dimly lit of our waiting?
And Missy with diamond lips is the realest metaphor. And the video shows what is lit up despite the grim, what reflects. Where they from is where they are alit.
Don’t forget the joints are strung up. In marionettes there is animation from an outsider animator – a puppet master who must tighten or loosen the strings into a motion. And sure there’s a person above things, but in the really-real and not just the humanocentric narratives we explain ourselves with, what animates a marionette is as much from what is below things as what is above them, and what is below them is gravity.
Where Missy is from is that Missy positions herself always as one joint in the folding body of the world. Of course it begins with the people, as the people always make the scene of sound. Of course it begins with the visual sentiment that the people who listen to music are as real as the ones who make it. The people are so often her introduction – as often as Mary J. Blige leads with a missed call, so Missy Elliott leads with the word on the street, with the image of who hears.
There’s a lot that stays consistent to Missy, and one of these things is Missy’s commitment to the beginner, to the appearance of the child as the idea of the beginner, to the world starting new with the one who starts out. Where the child is from is possibility, and so the children dance next to her in videos – a lot, expectedly, here too. In Missy’s work this is the beginner who is a prodigy – the child genius, dancing with astounding precision, with perfect furor and also perfect humor – an homage, maybe, to Missy the child genius, caught in the brutality of a violent home, her mother who left behind a few necessary objects as an act of confusing mercy for their abuser. But I think I shouldn’t write about this, not now. WTF is not “My struggle.” Though Missy’s joy is always in the context of social pain, it is a social pain so large that it is not a singular trauma – not her trauma, not that long-ago long-ago, not her mother’s. The pain she must bring joy out of is a landscape, a constant noise, a thing which you feel enough you shrug at –wtf? – and with a perfect realism of refusal, still make your songs.
Missy conducts: she orchestrates. She always has her dancers dance in impossibility. I first thought what she does is conducts a crowd to move “laterally” but this isn’t precise enough – what she does is conduct a crowd to move anyway it needs to, however the spirit of the crowdness calls. You can put your thing down, flip it, and reverse it: this is hip-hop’s most compelling ars poetica. It’s also, maybe, a politics, that not moving forward unless you want to, that taking on any space you need however even if you turn space itself inside out. It’s Missy as a social contortionist and conductor of social contortionists, Missy as a permitter of bending how you must but never forgetting the form you bent out of when you had to bend into what.
In this song about from, in this one viewing of this video, I am reminded that Missy is an expert in positions. She is a “prepositionist,” probably. We come from. We are from. In Missy’s music there are withs and ats and towards and tos. She unites by direction. It takes being funny to do that to people, also being genius, and Missy is, if she is anything, the genius. I wrote something once that a genius is the one who holds the cup so those whose names are written in the book of rules might have something to drink from. That’s maybe a too-much metaphor for just looking at a video, but I think of Missy offering a popular sacrament for all the people, saying “here, this is really weird, but in that it is really necessary, and you all can take a drink.”
I have always wanted to write about Missy, in a slow and studied way, in a carefully-contemplating-the-discography way, but to consider her work is to demonstrate the paucity of consideration itself, and here I am, dashing off an impression of WTF? in a morning among a thousand to-dos, like all her fans too turned up by her video to do anything I need without first doing what I want, which is to think about Missy Elliott. I’m not sure why it’s hyperbole to say “I would be nothing without Missy Elliot.” Is it maybe that what sounds like hyperbole is always the most common truth. But to be given that generous collectivity, that struggle and humor and the funny voices and aesthetic of spatial wiliness (of a kind of fuck you, I move how I need) in a world that would make you think that everything a woman does is just be a siren or a rockess, is to be given an aesthetic that a person who needs more can use for years. Where we are from is the space opened up by Missy Elliott, and if Missy says we should dance from the grave, we do.
Mostly I like to spend money on what is used. Think of how used shoes have a novelty of a stranger’s way of stepping as felt in your own feet against the wear or how to read a used book that is obviously used, the kinds with broken spines and marginalia and to do lists and inscriptions, is to read a literature value-added with a haunting. The used is charmed – or even glamorized, maybe – by proximity, also maybe by history and all the interesting differences between the known and the suggested and the never-to-be-known-exactly.
There is no way to “use up” a book. It never seems to run out of itself, but to spend money on what is used – even a book – at least draws one closer to that increasingly precious aesthetic state of “used up.” The “used up” mostly belongs to substances or objects that can be or commonly are contained, and it is mostly in relationship to their container that what can be used up becomes legible as use-up-able. Probably a thing that can be “used up” can’t be considered actually used until it is gone entirely, and maybe this is because a thing that can be “used up” is often a thing with a use that is recognizably metabolic, like how food or soap or gasoline is recognizably metabolic because of how quickly we watch it turn to something else.
A jean jacket is not too metabolic. Or at least a jean jacket is not instantly recognizable as metabolic. And a jean jacket is not measured in its state of usedness by its relation to, say, the thrift store bag a person brought it home in, so for it and things like it the options to understand it are not “used” and “used up” but “new” or in the lexicon of the-sellers-of-used-of-our-today it is “like new” or “gently used” or “worn.” Even something used until it is really, not gently (violently? indelicately? crassly?) worn is at least still itself – a jean jacket with some visible wear is still a jean jacket. It is itself entirely until that moment it is the non-(instantly recognizable as)-metabolic’s version of metabolic, which is not “used up” but “worn out.” In the “worn out,” or at least in that stage beyond it, it finally gives up its specificity, when it is really “worn out” then it isn’t a “worn jean jacket” it is trash, or a textile’s trash equivalent – a rag.
I probably would never spend money on a rag. Who knows. Maybe if someone made a rag’s long days of labor its own marginalia I would. But still, when something that doesn’t normally become “used up” begins to appear “used up” I kind of experience a satisfaction. And I don’t know if this is a kind of stockholm syndrome aesthetics built from the objects that were often the only ones I could afford or if the used up, the worn out are actually just that thrilling in general, like even if I had a choice of all the objects in the world I might still want to just spend on what has a chance of proving it can become something else in the slow run. I probably could never develop an attachment to any object that is not always announcing itself in dialectics.
Today Cassandra Gillig and I were talking about the gently used compost bin we just bought on Craigslist, and she’d never read Whitman’s “This Compost.” So of course then we read “This Compost” and stopped talking about our compost and started talking about Whitman’s. The thing Whitman goes from fearing as the poem becomes itself is not the death and disease that first startled him, but metabolism:
Now I am terrified at the Earth! It is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions
He’s terrified of patience! Of calmness! This might be the most compelling admission in all of poetry, that patience becomes more terrifying than death. But also what Whitman is terrified of is metabolism’s obscurity. Wear is mysterious. Use is accumulative and like all accumulative things, sometimes only visible with a bit of disciplined squinting. The metabolic nature of what is around us often goes unseen. The interior of the compost barrel stays dark. I could probably think about this stuff for years – also of the used’s relationship to “brokenness” too – which I guess answers the second part of your question about how I feel when I spend money on what I spend money on, which is the feeling “off on a tangent,” and the feeling of “let me read that poem again,” and the feeling of “oh wow I wrote too much” and the feeling of “allow me to tell you the story of this jean jacket, that shoe, that book, that dish, that end table, that basket.”
—Anne Boyer
In her new conversation project Stacey Tran asked me last night about how I spend my money, and I went on maybe too much about my preference for spending on what is already a little spent. And even though I went on so long I don’t think I even said enough about the used, the used-up, the worn, the worn-out, or the “thrifted” or “handed-down” as a memento metaboli, also there is so much to say about the haunting of objects, about that which is contained and uncontained, and what it means, too, to be attracted to the wearing or worn out objects of the world rather than the new ones, like somehow “the new” needs another human hand to rub some of the patina of ideology off of it. But don’t think I’m not trying to think critically here, either. It’s tragic the greatest poem of thrifting ever-written was written by Macklemore, but this is not unsurprising, either, and what is a literature made of appropriation but sometimes exactly like the literature of a rich kid who gets a thrill shoplifting from a thrift store?
Sometimes it is difficult to keep going in poetry, keep the mind of it, too, when everything in the world is structured against going in it, keeping the mind of it, too, like to be a poet in a world arranged like this is to be a tiny rock trying to move on its own legs, when of course rocks don’t even have legs, are not moving but moved; “poetry” some village(s) of delusional atemporal inamination somehow still animate and temporal, I guess, as if foolishness itself were a force stronger than even entropy.
“Wittig was nothing if not resistant. Working closely with Wittig—students, colleagues, friends—knew that any task we took on together would be labor-intensive because we would be questioning everything, especially language. Wittig let nothing go without saying in order to call out the many ways oppression marks us and to resist that oppression through creative interventions at every turn. Wittig always functioned on the periphery, refused the assumptions, the status quo, sacrificing the comfort of fitting the norms even in small ways—especially in institutional settings—for the greater goal of changing them. And while there is an element of reinvestment in the very thing one resists, in the process of materially resisting we learn the contours, find the limits of both the resistance and that which went without saying by calling it out. Doing so with humor, as Wittig does so powerfully, destabilizes the categories–even the ones of our own making. Wittig practiced faith in the plasticity of words as a material rather than in a discipline, refusing to be disciplined except in radical lesbian materialist terms. The dark humor of Wittig’s later works–Virgile, non and Paris-la-politique–leaves no one, including Wittig, unchallenged. This radical questioning which became more pointed with time characterizes all of Wittig’s work, encouraging readers to join in rooting out anything that goes without saying—to leave nothing so privileged that it can go without saying, to materialize and thereby counter such privileging through language. This is no small challenge and not always a comfortable way to live, but it is Wittig’s ethical practice”.
